Tokelau, a tiny island nation with nearly 17,000 domain names per resident

I’ve previously written about projects like Handshake attempting to build a new way for people to register domain names. Handshake’s goal is to replace root servers in the current domain name system to prevent the gatekeeping of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). To pull a passage from my piece:

Under the current DNS system, records of ownership for top-level domains (.com) are held by authoritative registries like Verisign. These registries are supervised by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which effectively gets to decide what can be accepted in the DNS root zone of top-level domains…The drawback, however, is that this structure also centralizes control over what top-level domains can be acceptable for the Internet, greatly limiting the possible top-level domain names. Because of ICANN’s gatekeeping, you can not purchase or get a top-level domain like “.myname” or “.whatever,” and connect it to the Internet.